Become a Vogue Business Member to receive unlimited access to Member-only reporting and insights, our Beauty and TikTok Trend Trackers, Member-only newsletters and exclusive event invitations.
On the closing night of Shanghai Fashion Week, Adidas staged a major fashion show in Old City Hall to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the brand’s Shanghai Creation Centre. From three-stripe, suede reimaginings of traditional Chinese silhouettes like the Tang jacket, to multi-layered performancewear and even three-stripe tailoring and baggy denim. Supermodel He Cong closed the night in a five-metre-long gown marked with the brand’s codes and paired with the new Futurecool X sneakers, all available to buy immediately post-show.
If you’re reading this from the West, bad news, you won’t be able to get your hands on any of the products. The onstage looks are exclusively designed by — and for — the Chinese market. Global Adidas ambassador, actor and designer Edison Chen was in attendance, alongside regional actors Sandra Ma Sichun, Li Xian and Wang Any, while many of Shanghai’s buzziest young designers, like Pronounce, who have previously collaborated with Adidas, sat front row.
The high-energy show — entitled ‘The Power of Three’ in honour of the Adidas three stripes — took place in five acts, including a performance from Chinese cellist Ouyang Nana and a dance battle. There were three runways, guests were served three-stripe macarons and even the lights projected three ‘stripes’ across the venue.
“The show ended up three times bigger than originally planned,” says Patrick Ng, Asia-Pacific SVP of product, who heads up the Shanghai Creation Centre and planned the show, speaking from the brand’s Shanghai studio a few days prior. “In China, we have this phrase that ‘everything is very competitive’. We are embracing the idea of outperforming each other, to strive for better. I always think the creative centre is a bit of a hero in the background. We’re not a designer brand, so no single designer would get a full applause.” They still got their flowers: at the end of the show, the whole of Ng’s team walked onto the three runways, with T-shirts reading “Adidas Design Team”.
The show was see-now, buy-now, with collections available on Tmall the day of the show, and in Adidas flagships on Anfu Road in Shanghai and Taikoo Li in Chengdu, the Beijing Sanlitun Brand Centre (one of the world’s biggest Adidas stores) and via the Adidas Confirmed app, the day following the show. The three-stripe theme was intentional, because like in the West, three-stripe apparel has been surging in the region, Ng says. “This brand marker has been doing a phenomenal job in the last couple of years in China, it’s been one of the hottest moments of the three stripes,” he says.
It’s a good time for Adidas to invest in the Chinese market, to stoke demand and harness potential. Sales for the Adidas brand in Greater China increased 13 per cent on a currency-neutral basis for the first half of 2025, according to the company. Growth was led by “strong double-digit gains” in lifestyle, driven by both sportswear and Originals lines. Performance revenues also increased, driven by double-digit growth in training and outdoor, alongside increases in running. The picture is positive, but like many brands, Adidas is seeing a normalisation off the back of a boom in China. Despite sales increases across Greater China, the company says domestic demand in China was subdued for the first half of the year, amid the challenging economic environment.
Appearing at Shanghai Fashion Week (SHFW) is becoming a familiar playbook for Western sportswear and performance labels. Ahead of SHFW, Lululemon staged a large-scale wellness event to celebrate its Chinese well-being report on 8 October. Last season, both Nike and Moncler staged fashion shows during SHFW, capitalising on the Chinese celebrities, designers and global press and buyers in town.
Ten guest designers, 8,000 attendees and 57 million viewers: Moncler’s City of Genius marked the brand’s most ambitious event yet.
Under CEO Bjørn Gulden, who joined Adidas in January 2023, Adidas’s motto has become “global brand and local mindset”, which empowered Ng and his team to pull together this show and celebrate the local design output and community, exclusively for Chinese consumers, he says. “It’s about how [the company] trusts this team in Shanghai that can really go after the opportunity [in China]. If they told us what to do, it would have a totally different result.”
How to harness the Chinese consumer
There’s been a lot written about Chinese consumers shifting focus to domestic fashion and apparel brands post-lockdown, particularly in sportswear.
It’s not just about Chinese consumers looking inwards and favouring Chinese brands, says Ng. “People don’t shop by nationality or where the brand is from. They shop [based on] what you’ve got to offer them,” he says. “I always say the Chinese consumer is probably the least brand loyal [consumer]. If you remove the label they don’t care. It’s about the actual product.”
The information economy in China, with a very digitally connected population, means consumers are fed a lot of information and require a lot of detail on the materials and technical capabilities of their clothes, he explains. As we saw in the rest of the world, consumers with more time on their hands became extremely savvy about performance materials during lockdown, which lasted in China until 2022.
Ng acknowledges competitor Lululemon did a great job of capitalising on the shift. “At that time, they were really focusing on the material distinction, and that’s why the Chinese people [thought] ‘OK, this brand knows what they’re talking about.’ They actually have a point of view.” Very quickly, Chinese brands “jumped on that bandwagon”, he says. Lululemon’s net revenue in China grew 41 per cent for fiscal 2024.
Chinese brands, like Li Ning or Anta, were able to adapt quickly to Lululemon’s approach, and also invested in innovation and more in-depth product information, because they produce locally and have more flexibility than a multinational behemoth like Adidas, he says.
Adidas had to catch up. Luckily, the Shanghai Creative Centre is close to manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, meaning the speed to market is much faster than in other territories, Ng says. Other territories may need to speak with Southeast Asian or Chinese suppliers anyway, but with the time difference, plus language and cultural barriers, it’s much more challenging and time consuming to reach the desired outcome. The show collection presented last week featured highly technical designs and fabrics, which were then explained in further depth at the fashion hub.
Twists on classics to stoke local desire
The aim of the Shanghai Creation Centre is to differentiate Adidas products, while retaining important Adidas brand codes like the three stripes or logo. “Our job is really to leverage our superpower and the brand’s 75-year history, but understand the context and what they like,” Ng says.
That doesn’t mean behaving like a Chinese brand. “Over all these years, whenever we had success, it is because we don’t pretend we’re Chinese. Chinese consumers are smart and understand you are not a Chinese brand — you don’t have to pretend to be Chinese,” Ng says. “I think it’s about paying true respect to the culture. When I mean culture, I don’t mean ‘Chinese culture’, it’s how people in China are living, we have to and bring that consumer insight into the hearts of the product creation.”
I point to Audrey Li, Adidas head of press in China, who is wearing some wide-leg Adidas trousers I’ve never seen before, covered in small bows, with a thicker three stripes that wrap slightly around the leg. “That’s part of our dance collection,” Ng says. “We wanted to really accentuate the beauty of the movement, so we took the three stripes and put it on a slanted execution, to elongate your legs. Since we launched this product last year, it’s become a phenomenon. We’ve continuously replenished. This is the third iteration of the product, not changing the design too much.” To promote the product, the brand held a pop up with KOLs (key opinion leaders), allowing them to customise their trousers, so she’d done the bows herself.
Adidas also worked with a Shanghai college dancing crew to promote the trousers, to demonstrate they are function as well as fashion. In the showroom, where I meet Li and Ng, there’s rails of China-exclusive product, with unique colourways or slightly altered silhouettes of iconic Adidas sneakers like the Gazelle or chunky knitwear in earthy tones, complete with the three stripes, which is a far cry from Adidas’s brightly coloured streetwear offering in the West.
Demonstrating creativity and finding talent
While the show is a major marketing push, Adidas wanted to prolong the experience and allow local consumers to get closer to the clothes. They transformed the show venue into a fashion hub from 17 to 19 October, with exhibition ‘A 20-Year Journey of Chinese Street Culture’ in collaboration with Hypebeast, alongside archive displays, product previews, displays of various collaborations and interactive experiences. “We want to make sure that this doesn’t just sit there as a video,” Ng says. “You can tell the story through just a 20-minute show. We want our consumers to understand the full value.”
Beyond engaging the Chinese consumer, the show is also designed to inspire young creative talents to work with Adidas. Many Shanghai designers have expressed that it’s challenging to find good designers in China, because many decamp to Europe or the US for their studies at schools like Parsons or Central Saint Martins, and go on to work at international brands.
“[Finding talent] is probably my utmost desire for the show,” Ng says. “I want to make sure people don’t miss out, that if you’re creative enough, this is where you should be and who you should be working with. Having creative talent is important for the future. A product at the end of the day you can sell for one year, two years, there’s an end to it. But good talents create unlimited opportunity.”
To measure the success of the show, of course, “there’s always a very simple objective” in terms of sales, Ng says. But there’s also a deeper goal. “This show is truly about what are the possibilities? We’re not going to focus so much on our past, because I think we already do a good job of telling people our history. It’s about what can be reimagined. China is a place where people are constantly looking for surprises — you need a lot more imagination.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
4 key takeaways from Shanghai Fashion Week
